Before Subversion the KDE project used the revision control system CVS. CVS works similar to SVN, but SVN is sometimes called "The better CVS". There is a frontend for CVS called [http://cervisia.kde.org Cervisia].

Before Subversion the KDE project used the revision control system CVS. CVS works similar to SVN, but SVN is sometimes called "The better CVS". There is a frontend for CVS called [http://cervisia.kde.org Cervisia].

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[[Category:KDE3]]

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[[Category:Architecture]]

Revision as of 09:44, 23 January 2007

KDE Architecture - Version Control System (VCS) Frontend

Contents

SVN Frontend kdesvn

What is SVN?

Subversion (SVN) is the version control system (VCS) which many open source projects -
including KDE - are using. It stores all sources codes in a central place,
called the repository. From the repository, developers can check out a
current version of the project or snapshots of it at arbitrary points of time.
In contrast to some other revision control systems, it is not necessary to
lock files one wants to work on. So development can be highly
parallelized.

Whenever a developer has finished a task, he commits his code
(accompanied by a log message). SVN takes the job to merge the changes made
by several developers. It can of course happen that developers work on the
same piece of code, resulting in a conflicting set of changes (in practice
this occurs seldom, and is often a sign of a lack of communication). In this
case SVN rejects a commit; only after all conflicts are resolved, a file can
be commited.

So far, this has been a description of the basic features of SVN one
usually has to cope with. But SVN can provide a lot more: One can
maintain several branches of a project (e.g. KDE 3.4 and KDE 3.5 are
branches in the branches directory), merge changes from one branch to
another, ask for differences between revisions, the revision history of
files etc.

What is kdesvn?

kdesvn intends to provide a friendly, graphical interface to SVN and is
technically a frontend for the command line client 'svn'. It gives the user an
easy to understand overview of status of his working directory (also called
the sandbox), giving information about which files have been modified
since the last update, which have been added or removed. Furthermore, it
provides access to the following features: